Brass: Birmingham Cards and Hand Management

Brass: Birmingham deals you 8 cards and lets you do almost anything with them. That freedom hides a puzzle. The cards decide where you can build, and the deck decides when each era ends. Players who understand the deck stop fighting their hand and start planning around it.

The deck by player count

The full deck has 64 location and industry cards. With fewer players, cards marked for higher counts go back in the box. The size of the deck follows from the round count: every player starts with 8 cards plus 1 face down in their discard pile, and every action uses a card.

The deck sizes for 2 and 3 players are our own count from the round totals. At every count, the deck runs out with four rounds to go, and those last four rounds come from the 8 cards in your hand.

The Rail Era deck is always complete

At the end of the Canal Era, every discard pile is shuffled into a new deck, including the face-down cards from setup. Wild cards go back to their own spaces when played, never into a discard pile. So the Rail Era deck holds every location and industry card for your player count, every game. Nothing you discarded in the Canal Era is lost; it simply comes back in a random order.

Location cards and industry cards

• A location card builds any industry that town has a space for, even outside your network. It is your way into a new town.
• An industry card builds the industry shown, but only in a town already in your network.

Early in an era, location cards open the map. Later, once your network is wide, industry cards become more flexible, because they work in any of your towns.

Some towns appear on more cards than others. In a 4-player deck, a town with 3 cards gives you about a 1 in 3 chance of holding at least one of them in an opening hand of 8. A town with a single card gives you about 1 in 8.

Fuel and builds

Only Build needs a particular card. Network, Develop, Sell, Loan, and Scout each take any card, and so does a pass. That splits every hand into two piles:

• Builds. Cards for a town or industry you plan to use.
• Fuel. Everything else.

The common mistake is spending a build card as fuel because it was on the left of your hand. Before each action, decide which pile the card comes from.

When to Scout

Scout discards 3 cards and gives you 1 Wild Location and 1 Wild Industry. Your hand shrinks by one, the same as any other action. So the real cost of a Scout is the action itself, plus two cards that could have been fuel.

Scout when:

• You need a build you cannot reach, such as a town with one card in the deck, and the build is worth an action.
• Your hand is all fuel and you need flexibility for the coming rounds.

There are 4 of each wild card, and you cannot Scout while you already hold one. A Wild Location cannot build at a farm brewery; a Wild Industry can.

Hand management after the deck runs out

Once the deck is empty, your hand is your whole future. Lay out the remaining builds and fuel, and count: if you have 6 cards left and three builds to make, you have exactly 3 fuel actions for every Network, Sell, Develop, and Loan you still need. The endgame lesson in Level 4 turns this into a full plan.

Reading the discard piles

Discards go face up, so the top card of each rival’s pile shows the last card they spent. Over a few rounds, that tells you something about what they are holding back. A rival who keeps discarding location cards for distant towns may be saving industry cards for their network.